Shepherd in the Wilderness, Peter Hobart 1604-1679

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Summary: A Closer Look: Puritans in the Wilderness
Review: Check Your Review of Shepherd in the Wilderness by Edward Franklin Ripley

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A Closer Look: Puritans in the Wilderness Reviewer: Thomas P.Hughes from Philadelphia, PA USA

Edward Ripley, a full-time Philadelphia investment adviser and part- time historian, has written an engaging life of Peter Hobart (1604-1679), a Puritan minister who emigrated to Massachusetts seeking to practice his faith free of constraint. Ripley uses his biography of Hobart, a founder of Hingham Plantation, now Hingham, Massachusetts, as a window on the political, social, and economic life of 17th century settlers. Only a few original sources about Hobart exist, but Ripley deploys them imaginatively to leave readers with a feeling that they know Hobart and his times. A Hobart sermon is particularly moving: "the forest around us, the sea at our shores, the expanse of cleared fields warmed by the sun and clothed with a bountiful verdure--all of these will yield us manifold by the toil of our bodies.... Friendly intercourse with the red people...will work only for good...." Learned and, according to Cotton Mather, displaying hearty love towards pious men, Hobart, nevertheless, engaged in a fractious dispute with John Winthrop, the renown governor of Massachusetts. Taking a stance counter to some admirers of Winthrop, Ripley argues that Hobart courageously opposed an arbitrary decision of a sometimes autocratic governor. Readers who treasure the early history of Massachusetts should find this carefully crafted book an edifying account of an admirable man who shaped the community of Hingham Plantation and its countless descendents.